Cisco unveils new AI networking chip, taking on Broadcom and Nvidia 

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 10 (Reuters) - ⁠Cisco Systems ⁠on ‍Tuesday launched a new chip and router designed to speed information through massive data centers that will ‍compete against offerings from Broadcom and Nvidia for ​a piece of the $600 billion AI infrastructure spending boom.

Cisco said its Silicon ​One G300 switch chip, expected to go on sale in the second half of the year, will help the chips that train and ​deliver AI systems talk to each other over hundreds of thousands of links.

The chip will be made with ​Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's 3-nanometer chipmaking technology and will have several new "shock absorber" features ‌designed to help networks of AI chips from bogging down when hit with large spikes ​of data traffic, Martin Lund, executive ⁠vice president of Cisco's common hardware group, told Reuters in an interview.

Cisco expects the chip ‌to help some AI computing jobs get done 28% faster, in part by re-routing data around any problems in the network automatically, ‌within microseconds.

"This happens when you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands ‌of connections - it happens quite regularly," Lund said. "We focus on the total end-to-end efficiency of the network."

Networking has become a key competitive field ‍in AI. When Nvidia unveiled its newest systems last month, one of the six key ⁠chips in the system was a networking chip that competes with Cisco's offerings. Broadcom is going after the same market with its "Tomahawk" series of chips.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jamie Freed)

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